Yael Bartana
(b. 1970) is an Israeli-born artist who lives and works in Amsterdam and Tel Aviv.
She graduated from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design (BFA) and the School of Visual Arts in New York (MFA). She works mainly in film, photography, video and audio installations, in which her focus is the post-Zionist deconstruction of 20th century visual and musical languages of political art. She had several solo exhibitions (and Europe will be stunned, Moderna Museet, Malmö, 2010; P.S. 1, NY, 2009; Nightmares, Jewish Museum, New York, 2009; Short Memory, Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, 2008, Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg, 2006; Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2006) and took part in numerous group shows (Acting Out: Social Experiments in Video, ICA, Boston, 2009; 3xYES, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2009; Monument to transformation, transit, Prague, 2009). In 2010, she won the Artis Mundi Art Prize in the United Kingdom. Her film trilogy titled And Europe Will Be Stunned represented Poland at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011.
And Europe Will be Stunned is Yael Bartana’s most ambitious work so far, and will be presented at Auditorium Moscow by pavilion co-curator Galit Eilat. The trilogy of films narrates the fictional future of the Jewish Renaissance Movement of Poland, a community of post-Zionist settlers not limited to Jews. Its leader is played by Slawomir Sierаkowski, who heads the real political movement Krytyka polityczna. In these films, Bartana quotes and deconstructs the cinematic language of 1930s political propaganda, mixing fact with fiction: the films are both advertisements for the real-life Jewish Renaissance Movement -- a political project Bartana is really pursuing -- and ironic deconstructions of a politics fatally trapped in homogenizing epistemes and myths of leadership.